The environmental group gave up its singular focus on climate change for a broader agenda. The ensuing internal strife left it weakened as it takes on the Trump administration.
The environmental group gave up its singular focus on climate change for a broader agenda. The ensuing internal strife left it weakened as it takes on the Trump administration.
David Sedaris in a commencement speech gave some advice that has really stuck with me and is quite apt, I think. To paraphrase, “you can’t win everything, so pick one or two issues to be passionately angry about and try to change and focus on those, or you won’t get anything done.”
Found the quote, Oberlin 2018 commencement: “Choose one thing to be terribly, terribly offended by, and be offended by this as opposed to the dozens or possibly hundreds that many of you are currently juggling… Stand up for what you believe in, as long as I believe in the same thing. Those of you who’d like to ban assault rifles, I am behind you 100 percent. Take the front lines, give it your all, and don’t back down until you win. Do not, however, petition to have a Balthus painting removed from the Met because you can see the subject’s underpants. The goal is to have less in common with the Taliban, not more.”
[relevant xkcd].
The Taliban won against two global superpowers, so I don’t get what this sentence is doing in a quote arguing how to be an effective activist. Sure in 2018 the US hadn’t retreated yet, but Oberlin could have seen the writing on the wall.
Single-issue complaining is great if you care about winning more than you care about doing good. Who cares about whether the proposal you’re nagging on about would be disastrous for some voiceless minority, you can be the one to win the tablescraps that capitalists throw out to feel good about themselves! Maybe you’ll even manage to die of old age before people come to hate you. But sure, these are the people that “succeed” so they are the ones that get invited to hold commencement speeches, pay no attention to the thousands that tried the same thing but failed.
The most important aspect of being a reasonable person is willingness to learn; to change your mind if you were mistaken. If you are a single-issue complainer your entire life’s work can topple because of a single inconvenient truth. So you can stick to your guns or you can do the right thing and have accomplished nothing of note. But a broad movement can have a culture of learning and change.
A social justice activist can be convinced that it’s not just to argue against this one wind park in a semi-natural environment because the alternative is either electricity blackouts or an old coal plant spewing carcinogens, because they can change to a different activist project without leaving the movement, its community, and its infrastructure.
Turning a broad tentpole group like the Sierra Club from a narrow-issue project to a broader one is naturally going to have a lot of drama because there are a lot of people who aren’t willing to be open-minded about the broader set whose attitudes were allowed to fester because of the narrow focus. But an equally broad movement starting from the ground up will have fewer issues.
There is the issue that the wider your cause, the more things there are to learn, so onboarding takes a lot more time, but the benefits are synergistic. Things start to click into a full ideology, and people within the ideology have a much easier time teaching each other about specific cause-elements of it than if every cause had to start from nothing.
This is the history of Communism, of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Renaissance, and of early Christianity. Historically these movements took decades or centuries to take root, but when they did the effect was culturally absolute. It is hard to fully comprehend the worldview of people on the other side of these divides.
The world is ready for another cultural revolution of that magnitude. We’ve already been moving on this road for over a century. The election of figures like Donald Trump, people elected because of their refusal to engage with morality even if it comes at the cost of incompetence, shows the desperation of those that stick to the status quo ante. There is no justification left, only violence in word or action.
So you have a choice: help change everything, or dedicate your life to convincing a billionaire that you’re the most deserving beggar out of all of the ones assembled before him.